Recently I attended a church service for Volunteer Sunday. On this day the minister suspended the normal preaching programme to design a service and preach a sermon celebrating the many volunteers who week in week out exercised a faithful and fruitful ministry in the church and on behalf of the church in the community. I had been to such services before and with the writing of this post in mind I was especially looking forward to this service.  I was not disappointed. This church goes all out. It is never a half- hearted afterthought such as: ‘Hello everybody thanks for your ministry. Now let’s return to normal business’.

On the day the church and foyer were festooned in a celebratory atmosphere. The service and sermon had a theme of ‘hundreds and thousands’. This was meant to embody the idea of hundreds of volunteers ministering to thousands of people. Fairy bread covered with ‘hundreds and thousands’ were distributed in the foyer after the service.

The preacher used a very, very large adhesive board and to it, attached dozens of coloured dots which represented people in ministry and reinforced the theme. The bible passage was Romans 16 where the apostle Paul greets a galaxy of otherwise unheralded ministry friends. These are people who were highly significant in Paul’s ministry and had laboured long, diligently and effectively in gospel work but don’t get the attention that we naturally pay to figures like Peter, Paul, James and John.

The connection is easy to make. Congregations are naturally aware of the ministry of the preacher, the music director or people who pray, lead singing or read the bible. Their ministry is prominent and visible. Volunteer Sunday gives the opportunity to thank not only the prominent people but also those who humbly and faithfully serve behind the scenes. At Figtree Anglican Church, where I ministered for many years, there was an unobtrusive lady who had been folding the church bulletins, midweek, since the 1940s! What fantastic devotion and how appropriate it is to thank such a servant.

During the sermon the preacher invited people in the various ministry groups , pastoral care, missions, service, children, youth, mentoring, men’s women’s ministries to come onto the platform where he prayed for them and the congregation celebrated their service with acclamation. Many hundreds came forward and crowded the front. They were invited to stick a coloured dot to the adhesive board indicating their ministry and giving them a tangible participation in the message. Apart from the virtue of thanking God for his goodness and thanking his people for their ministry the celebrating of volunteers has other benefits in the life of the church.

First, it introduces a sense of real joy. The entire atmosphere of the service was one of delight in the Lord and his goodness. This congregation loves their church and this service is just one reason why. Second, Volunteer Sunday always acknowledges the vision and mission of the church. The ministry is not being done as a chore but for the glory of God. Celebrated leadership author Peter Drucker says that ‘Volunteers work for a cause’. Volunteer Sunday gives ample opportunity to remind everyone of the gospel imperative by which we live.

Third, it makes raising money so much easier. I discuss in detail raising money for ministry in my book, Giving Generously. It is a simple fact that people who serve in the ministry of the church in a practical way also give more money to that ministry. Volunteers are involved, invested and they are committed and are consequently more likely to be generous regular donors and respond to special appeals for financial support.

The church I refer to is a large, healthy church of very generous givers. It has over 1000 volunteers in ministry and given the way the church thanks them and celebrates their ministry, it is easy to see why.

You can find the sermon “Volunteer Sunday” by Andrew Sercombe from Gateway Baptist Church here.

In 1995 my wife Helen Irvine and I went on a trip to the US where we visited a number of churches and I went to two conferences. One of the speakers I heard was Rick Warren, the Baptist pastor of Saddleback church south of Los Angeles. He spoke of a large Capital Works campaign to finance the construction of their building. It had been called ‘Time to Build’. The campaign had raised an amazing $US22 million in money given on the day and pledged over three years.

I found later that Rick had conducted a number of such campaigns, the first being ‘Possess the Land’. Saddleback church had commenced in Rick’s lounge room and as the church grew had met in a variety of properties that the church didn’t own. As the titles suggest the ‘Possess the Land’ campaign was to finance buying of their first property, and then ‘Time to Build’ was to finance the erection of a suite of buildings. Later Rick ran a further campaign called ‘Build for Life’. In fact conducting campaigns for a variety of purposes has become a hallmark of Saddleback’s ministry. The campaigns 40 Days of Purpose and 40 Days of Community have been used fruitfully all over the world.

As I discussed in my book, Giving Generously , when I came to financing Figtree Anglican Church’s building development I thought that I would need professional assistance to help raise such a large amount of money, many times the church’s annual operating budget. However, such a professional needed to be chosen very carefully. I believed they needed to have a good track record with engaging with churches as opposed to schools or other not-for-profit organizations. They would need to fit the culture and theological ethos of Figtree Anglican. A cultural mismatch in theology or methodology would be counterproductive at best and disastrous at worst. And of course they needed to be available and willing to come. My problem was that I couldn’t find any who met all three requirements.

However all was not lost. I found that Saddleback had produced a relatively inexpensive Time to Build kit showing in great detail precisely what we needed to do. With the invaluable assistance of my extraordinarily capable administrator Karen Dixon and a legion of wonderful volunteers we bought the kit, put it into practice and conducted a very fruitful campaign. Three years later we needed to repeat the process and by then the kit was called Build for Life. It contained very similar material.

Until quite recently the Build for Life kit was available to be purchased from Saddleback but it appears to have been withdrawn from sale. However, very similar material can still be accessed. As I noted above, conducting campaigns and helping other churches conduct campaigns is a feature of Saddleback’s ministry. An overview of what needs to be done can be found on the Campaign Central section of the Saddleback website. See https://store.pastors.com/pages/campaign-central

For more detail go to the free 33 page Campaign Success Guide

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0545/9317/files/Daring_Faith_Success_Guide.pdf?3657149131282000050

This is for a series called Daring Faith but the material in the Guide relates to campaigns in general.

Each of these campaigns has, at the core, a related sermon series of approximately six weeks. I found such series invaluable because at the start I had no idea how to preach in such a campaign. What I needed was simply to listen to other preachers to see just what they would say, and find a way I say something similar in my own voice and in my own context.

The original Build for Life sermon series is still available for purchase at: https://store.pastors.com/collections/building-for-life

They are certainly worth hearing.

Finally of course, read my book Giving Generously, especially chapter 14, where I explain in some detail how we applied these concepts at Figtree Anglican Church.

Great Redeemer Church was centrally situated in a regional town that was experiencing considerable population growth. Numbers at church services were steadily increasing and the auditorium was ancient and obviously too small. The projected cost of a new worship centre was in the vicinity of $ 2 Million. The operating budget was $750,000. How could they fund the new centre? Again after wrestling with the problem in prayer and dialogue, the board thought the solution was evident. For as long as anyone could remember the church had owned a large block of land adjacent to the church, currently used as overflow parking at Christmas and other large services. This property was becoming increasingly valuable. Why not sell a large portion of this land and resourcing the new auditorium would be straightforward?

The above examples are typical of decisions regularly being made by churches desiring to upgrade facilities or construct new buildings. Those decisions are often very ill-advised. I say often because there is no hard and fast rule and sometimes selling property is the only way to get a project up and going. I have known some outstanding ministers who have sold property for this purpose. But very often it is not the only way to proceed, and parishes sell valuable property in prime positions that they will never get back, in the process compromising future development.

In my book ‘Giving Generously: Resourcing Local Church Ministry’, I discuss conducting a capital campaign: one that involves sums in excess of the church’s annual budget. In my time at Figtree Anglican Church we conducted three such campaigns and they all were very fruitful. Under my successor Ian Barnett, Figtree church has now repaid a multimillion dollar loan that helped fund a wonderful auditorium. The Figtree project was so large it needed even more than capital campaigns could realistically raise.

Conducting a capital campaign is very daunting because of the large sums involved and because often ministers don’t know where to start. I completely understand this because I led the three campaigns mentioned and initially had no idea what to do. So if you read this and are feeling nervous, I totally empathise. However, there are many, many positives in attempting to raise the money.

 A successful church capital campaign is based around vision, mission, generosity and then asking for support sensitively and confidently. It is simply a marvellous opportunity to crystallise what your church stands for and where you are going, and to build faith and hope and generosity into the congregation. These are opportunities too good to be missed.

Recently Helen Irvine and I were asked to give money at church and now that process is over I reflected on why we gave and why we were happy to give.

Fourth, the message itself was based on a famous passage of the bible,